The HTC Flyer in the flesh

Anybody curious about HTC’s own 7-inch tablet? I saw the HTC Flyer yesterday at an event courtesy of our good friend, MB tech editor, Mr. Art Samaniego. You got to love being Art having all those latest toys before we see it here. But I digress, we’re talking about the HTC Flyer here.

HTC is a bit late when they released their Flyer (just last month in the US) but they sure made this one good-looking. You would see the familiar accents that’s also present in their HTC phones. The aluminum unibody look with the white portion on the top and bottom is reminiscent of the HTC Legend which carried over to current phones.

Although it’s only powered by a single core processor, the device clocks at 1.5GHz. Navigating through its beautiful HTC Sense UI is pretty smooth. Haven’t tried it running multiple heavy applications / games at once so we don’t know how heavily affected multitasking is by the single core. It uses Android Gingerbread (2.3) for its OS instead of the tablet-centric Honeycomb so you can still do voice calls and send SMS here.

A 5 megapixel camera runs its photo and 720p video recording capabilities and there’s also a 1.3 megapixel up front for video calling. The same camera features and effects found on its high-end phones are also available in the Flyer.

The differentiator the Flyer has over other 7-inch tablets is its digital pen they call HTC Scribe which makes this a handy digital note-taking, scribbling, and doodling tablet. But that’s the only thing you can use the stylus from the get-go. I have yet to see other apps that would use the stylus.

Other than the digital pen, it’s pretty much your ordinary 7-inch tablet. There’s no built-in HDMI out here which I kinda like for a tablet.

So when will it arrive here in the country? HTC Phils. won’t say yet but Art told me that it may not reach here. You’re better off buying it in the US where BestBuy is selling it for $500 without the digital pen ($80).